Windows 7 - Cold Hard Drive

Hi all.

I recently left my window open for about 4 hours when the temperature was quite low. When I turned my computer on it took 10 minutes for my Hard Drive to stop making noises. It eventually switches to near silent running, the same as when I bought it.

Could this be the screws that hold the drive in place? Something to do with expansion/ contraction?

Thanks for your help in advance, Ste.

Possibly related to the draft, but unlikely; unless it go very cold inside the room.

I'd go to the hard drive manufacturer's web site and download their drive testing utility to see if it found any errors. If it did, I would get my data off the drive and expect it to fail sooner rather than later.

Cheers, will do that now, Ste.

I've checked for the utility and it says that it's a DOS checking utility which kind of un-nerves me. It says that there could be potential data loss due to a write function it uses and as I have backed up my data I don't want it to mess up my Windows 7 install as I don't want tohave to fo it again(Can't back everything up).

I'm thinking about getting inside and tightening up the screws. It takes about 15 mins for the drives to settle down and go into cool runnings. It performs really quietly then.

I don't understand why it takes that amount of time. Could it be rocking back and forth in the holding tray?

Ste.

I honestly would not do that. The internals of the drive are very delicate and even under "Clean Room" conditions, it takes a trained individual with the correct tools.

Who knows why the drive is acting up?

Your stuff is backed up or it isn't.

You can't find out if the drive is bad without running a disk checking utility of some type.

You have to make a choice about which is more unnerving: the utility or the drive weirdness. If my stuff was in fact backed up, I'd run the utility.